Here is Today

http://hereistoday.com/

I always get a little annoyed/weirded out by these kinds of time comparisons because to me the underlying message is, "Today is not that big of a deal. Get over it." It's similar to the "There are starving kids in Africa" argument for why your problems aren't that important. Yes, I know that my problems (or a 15-year old's problems) are not that dramatic in the larger scheme of things and that many of the things I'm pre-occupied with today will be relatively insignificant by the end of the year, the decade, etc. But that doesn't mean those things aren't real and important to me in this moment. It diminishes and invalidates someone else's emotions to tell them, "So what? In geological time, you're invisible." Everyone else is invisible too, but that shouldn't make them any less important or worthy of our love and attention.

But on to the math. What's cool about this interactive graphic is the proportionality and evolution of the part versus the whole. "Today" remains the numerator, but the denominator changes and our concept of "today" changes as a result. Seems like an interesting way of thinking about and understanding fractions, proportions, percents, and relative size. I think it would be interesting for kids to create or think about their own life maps in this way. What does today look like in comparison to your entire 15-year old life? Thinking about an important time period in your life, what is its relative size compared to today? Compared to an different time period in your life? It also feels like there's something interesting in there around fractions greater than 1--your life thus far is 1, so what will your 20 year old life look like?

Food Equivalencies

What does 2000 calories look like?

There are nice visuals around how many ____ are equal to how many ____ in terms of food. The bacon to cinnabon equivalency is my favorite, I think, because we think of bacon being so unhealthy. (Not that we think of cinnabons as being so unhealthy, but I, as a teenager, was definitely more likely to get a "snack" at the mall of a cinnabon, but would never have gotten a stack of bacon as a snack).

Questions to think about:
-Are all calories the same?
-What sets of 2000 calories can you imagine eating (I can definitely imagine eating 2.5 cinnabons, but not a whole pizza)? How does the mental association of these foods impact your eating?
-These equivalencies represent calories. Which would be the same if we looked at fats/protein/carbs/etc.
-Why is 2000 calories the recommended daily allowance?

Maybe it's not super mathematically interesting, but I do think it gets into units and the meaning of the equals sign in an interesting way.